"Time in Culture: Mediation and Representation," Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory, University of Tartu, October 28-30, 2010.

This year the international autumn conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory (CECT) focuses on the topic of time as a category which, in every respect, touches upon human gency and entity. Issues of past, present, future and the culture of history (time) are symptomatic to our era. This topic also enables us to intertwine the viewpoints of the different disciplines of cultural research. The autumn conference aims at critical and reflexive discussions on the tendencies of how time functions within culture. An additional starting point would be the ways different media construct time within the framework of private, institutional, group specific, etc., interests. The points of departure for discussion would be the following interconnected aspects of the construction and representation of time/temporality: • The mediality and intertextuality of time; specific genres of mediating time, their sociocultural, technical, etc., development; • Agency, private and public aspects in the production and reception of temporality; empowerment and domination in the construction of temporality; • Institutional (museum, archive, school, church, etc.) and group specific usage of time and its means of mediation; • The domain of the category of time in social and culture studies; the concept and discussion of time in different disciplines and approaches; how we use concepts based on time to define our objects of study, how the times on object- and meta-levels are related. The keynote speakers are Eviatar Zerubavel (Rutgers University, USA), Gunther Kress (University of London, UK) and Carmen Leccardi (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy). The aim of the conference is to dislocate the established academic borderlines and – focusing on the consciousness of time in culture – encourage research that leads to presentations employing the possibilities of several disciplines. Joint presentations by researchers from different research fields are preferred. Please send the abstract of your presentation (200–500 words) by June 15, 2010, to cect@ut.ee. Selected papers based on conference presentations will be published in the CECT compendium. For additional information, email: Monika Tasa, cect@ut.ee. Visit the CECT home page: http://www.ut.ee/CECT.